Wednesday, October 14, 2009

The organizers of the first Neurobiology of Language Conference (NLC) have included two "panel discussions" that focus on current debates in the neuroscience of language. I was in Steve Small's lab in Chicago when these sessions were being planned and I can tell you that "throwdown sessions" was closer to the intent than panel discussions :-). Anyway, the sessions pit two vocal scientists on either side of a debate in the field; each gets a few minutes to make their case and then the floor is open for "discussion".

Throwdown #1: The Battle for Broca’s Area (see I told you throwdown is a better word!)In one corner Yosef Grodzinsky, in the other corner Peter Hagoort

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Greg Hickok is Professor of Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine, Editor-in-Chief of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, and author of The Myth of Mirror Neurons. DavidPoeppel, after several years as Professor of Linguistics and Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park, is now Professor of Psychology at NYU. Hickok and Poeppel first crossed paths in 1991 at MIT in the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience where Hickok was a post doc, and Poeppel a grad student. Meeting up again a few years later at a Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meeting in San Francisco, they began a collaboration aimed at developing an integrated model of the functional anatomy of language. Research in both the Hickok and Poeppel labs is supported by NIDCD.